Playing=Learning

The last of the three posts from 10 years ago that I’m revisiting. It’s interesting to me that the themes of play, of experimentation, of failure were as strong then as they seem to be today. What does that tell us?

————–

It’s interesting how we use the phrase “play with it” as a synonym for learning. “I don’t know much about that yet, as I haven’t had a chance to play with it.”

This popped into my head while I was listening to a speaker at a NERCOMP SIG talk about how they were learning a new technology. It got me to thinking that really when we use the term what we are really doing is denoting the process of experiential learning. The ability to experiment, fail, retry and grow as a result of the process is exactly what our children do, and we ought to be doing ourselves, as adults, perhaps even more importantly, as educators.